House Made of Dawn
by N. Scott Momaday
Summary
Abel comes home to Walatowa in the summer of 1945 so drunk that he does not recognise his grandfather at the station. He has been at war in Europe, he has no language for what happened to him there, and the pueblo he left has kept its ceremonies and its calendar and has no obvious place for him.
He works for a white woman, Angela St John, who is bored and pregnant and takes him to bed. He rides badly in the festival. He is humiliated by a man called Juan Reyes, an albino, and then kills him with a knife outside a bar, and Momaday writes the killing as something closer to ritual than to crime.
Prison, then Los Angeles under the federal relocation programme: a factory job, a parole officer, and an urban Indian congregation led by Tosamah, the Priest of the Sun, who preaches brilliantly and mocks Abel for believing any of it. A policeman beats him nearly to death on a beach. His friend Ben Benally takes over the third section and speaks it aloud.
Then he goes home to his grandfather's dying, and at dawn he joins the runners.
The four parts are dated and out of sequence, the prose is lyrical and often withholding, and the book asks a reader to sit inside confusion rather than explaining it away. It is short, around two hundred pages, and slow going in the best sense.
Best for readers who will let a novel work by accumulation. Anyone who wants a clear chronology should expect to reread the first section after finishing the last.
Historical Context & Significance
House Made of Dawn won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and made N. Scott Momaday, who was Kiowa, the first Native American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The critic Kenneth Lincoln later dated the beginning of the Native American Renaissance to that award.
It was Momaday's first novel, published in 1968 after a doctorate at Stanford under the poet Yvor Winters, and it draws on the years he spent at Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico, where his parents taught school. The title comes from a passage in the Navajo Night Chant. He followed it in 1969 with The Way to Rainy Mountain, which sets Kiowa oral history, family memoir and his own commentary side by side.
Later writers including Leslie Marmon Silko and Louise Erdrich have credited it with launching their own work. Richardson Morse filmed it in 1972 with Larry Littlebird. Momaday received the National Medal of Arts in 2007 and died in Santa Fe in January 2024, at eighty nine.